A Self-Writing To-Do List

A Self-Writing To-Do List

By using
ubiquitous communication tools like e-mail and text messaging to interact with Sandy, says Dornfest, users
can get organized without stopping to think too hard about it. “A lot of the
things Sandy
takes down would never have made it into a calendar in your lifetime–it’s just
too painful,” he says. “Most organizational systems break your flow. They try
to make you do something else for a moment, and then you can go back to
whatever you were doing in the first place.”

Another new
program, reQall–developed by QTech, based
in Hyderabad, India–pushes that idea even
further by giving users a toll-free number they can call and leave messages at.
Whatever your favorite communication medium–e-mail, Web, text messaging, or
phone–odds are that reQall can parse it. Voice-recognition software, live
human transcriptionists, and natural-language processing algorithms read your
messages and use them to generate reminders that can be delivered by e-mail,
text messages, or voice calls, customized for the user.

“If I say,
‘Remember to buy a watermelon tomorrow,’ I won’t see it today,” says QTech
founder Sunil Vemuri, who got
the idea for the program while a PhD student researching memory at MIT’s Media Lab. “The system will
interpret the sentence and put it in the right place. It removes some of the
cognitive burdens of trying to get the idea out and organize it.”

Neither Presdo, IWantSandy, nor
reQall has an obvious business model. Their creators are contemplating charging
fees for premium accounts in the future, but for now, all three applications are
free of charge.

The sudden
popularity of organizers that are just a text message away may be part of a
larger trend. For two decades, software has been dominated by graphical user
interfaces, which employ visual features like windows and icons to convey
information. But clearly, Google isn’t the only company that’s banking on text
entry. The command line is making a comeback–and increasingly,
natural-language processing is bringing the ease and simplicity of text-based
computing to the non-tech-savvy.

“There are going to be more and
more applications which are less monolithic screens, and more dashing off quick
missives,” says Dornfest. “We’ve just begun to scratch the surface here.”